I’d like to invite you to share your thoughts on the future of bioinformatics in NZ over the next few years.

On the 3rd of May be a one-day meeting’Where will New Zealand Bioinformatics be in 2013?’ will be held at the University of Auckland. As the title suggests, this is to be a future-looking event, discussing what is needed in the (short-term) future.

A wide range of topics are being discussed, including GRID computing, which I (tried to!) open a discussion on.

I have started to write a longer post offering some of my own thoughts, but in the meantime, I would like to invite people to look at the schedule for the meeting, then speak up and share what they see as important for the short-term future of bioinformatics.

For those that won’t be attending the meeting, I will do what I can to present your views. (Bear in mind that as I am not a speaker, my opportunities may be limited.)

National and international collaborative computer networks offer different styles of data and computing interactions. I’m curious to hear people’s opinions on these. Below I offer some local links and invite discussion.

When I viewed the film, I found it worked best to use full-screen viewing. (Move your mouse over the video and press the button to the lower right that shows four arrows pointing to the corners of it’s icon.)

Previously I have written that in my opinion homeopathy has no place in pharmacies. In a recent comment on his blog, Stephen Curry pointed to a BBC News article reporting that the governing body of pharmacists in Northern Ireland has

proposed that patients be told that homeopathic products do not work, other than having a placebo effect

A copy of the draft proposed to form the consultation guidelines for pharmacists in Northern Ireland is available on-line (PDF file, 5 pages including title page).

The opening paragraph notes that given an obligation to provide patients with scientific accurate advice,

the only advice a pharmacist could reasonably give about such products is that they are placebos

Not geeky or dweeby. Nerdy. For the confused, there is a Venn diagram.

Your ideas on what is what may vary. Most definitions of ‘geeky’ I’ve seen on the WWW are more positive with the ’obsession’ angle, describing it as people that are into new things, curious, pushing the boundaries. I like that.

What are scientists like in their own time?

Movies usually have us as being nerdy there too.

Full-time nerds.

Uuurrgh.

Nova’s The Secret Life of Scientists series pops the lid on scientists’s lives, featuring a cast of scientists in both their work and non-work lives.

The series has recently been nominated for a Webby award. GrrlScientist has a blog post encouraging people to vote for Best Documentary Series in the Weeby’s, featuring a promotional video.

If you search YouTube for ’the secret life of scientists’ you’ll see that they have posted many short ~2 minute ‘10 questions’ interviews of scientists presented on the series there.

Kristian Larsen’s clever cross image fader lets you see regions of different temperatures on the sun on the WWW by moving a slider.

(Source:SOHO,NASA)

Sciblogs latest video shows some of the first images from astronomers’ latest ’toy’, the Hinode satellite. (Geeks can check out Nasa’s ’lite’ take on it’s technical specifications.)

The satellite has several telescopes. The opening frames of the video showing the sun in red, green, blue then yellow are from the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, or EIT for short.

(Source: wikipedia.)

Light can be thought of as repeated waves, like ripples on a pond. The wavelength of light is the length from the top of one wave to the top of the next wave.

Each colour in the video represents light from a different wavelength in the extreme ultraviolet.

Ultraviolet light have shorter wavelengths than visible light, what you and I see with our eyes. The shortest light we can see is perceived as a deep purple.

)”]

(Source: wikipedia [cropped from original

The EIT records light at four different wavelengths: 304, 171, 195 and 284 Ã…ngstrÃ¶ms (or Ã…). An Ã…ngstrÃ¶m is one ten-millionth of a millimetre, or 10-10 of a metre. (The scale in the graphic above is in metres. One Ã…ngstrÃ¶ms is a 10-10 of a metre. 100 Ã…ngstrÃ¶ms is 10-8 metres, which you can see in the left extreme of the UV region.)

These different measurements are used to determine which regions surrounding the sun are at several different temperatures: 60,000 – 80,000, 1, 1.5 and 2 million degrees Kelvin, respectively for each wavelength of 304, 171, 195 and 284 Ã…ngstrÃ¶ms. They’ve coloured the regions detected red, blue, green then yellow, respectively. (A degree Kelvin is temperature measured with zero set at absolute zero, or -273.15ËšC. The scale is named after Lord Kelvin.)

Kristian Larsen, an applied physics engineer from Denmark, developed a web application to show the latest images from the Hinode satellite using a slider (show to right) that fades the images from one wavelength into the next, so that you can easily compare them.

The touch interface of the iPad opens opportunities for affordable assistive devices for some disabled people.

In a funny way it’s appropriate following my recent posting of a video of a cat interacting with their owner’s iPad. If a cat can interact with the device, so could some disabled children. In the video below, a 2.5 year-old tries the iPad for the first time.

Young children find the interface natural, which is being exploited by companies producing interactive ’books’ and teaching aids for young children.

I’m showing you this video because of a comment by sarahcooley to a blog post hosting the video:

This is amazing! When my mother first saw the iPad she immediately thought of my youngest brother who is developmentally disabled. She said “I wish people would create software for kids like Philip who are smart, but their fine motor skills are not the best, a touch screen would be perfect”

I wanted to thank you for sharing this video because it really demonstrates the power of the device and how simple it is to use!

A debate on ‘Science in the Media’ was recently held at City University in London. Fiona Fox, director of the British Science Media Centre was one of the speakers, as were science writer and blogger Ed Yong, Natasha Loder, science and technology correspondent from The Economist, and pharmaceutical correspondent of the Financial Times, Andrew Jack.

This apparently morphed into a bloggers v. journalists debate. Reports are this shift centred around Fiona Fox saying ’ignore the mass media at your peril. Blogs are good but they are not journalism’ in response to Ed Yong expressing enthusiasm for the developments in blogging efforts.

I wasn’t at the event; I’m reading about it from a great distance, long after it happened through the words of others. So I can’t very well comment on the event. I can still opine about the general issue of bloggers v. journalists!

Fiona Fox has since written on the BBC College of Journalism website, arguing that Blogs are not real journalism. There she repeats her thought that blogs lack crucial objectivity.

There are a number of responses to this around the WWW, listed in the references. While I have read these, and encourage interested readers to read them too, I’m going to try write from my own thoughts.

(Source: alexcartoons.com)

First the obvious: Blogs themselves are a media, a means of delivering content. Journalism is an approach to delivering content, in particular content about news events.

One is a technology, the other a practice. (Martin at LayScience has since expressed a similar view.)

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